Therefore the most meritorious productions of the time, Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso, Bracciolini’s Scherno degli Dei, have a touch of Tassoni’s humor in them; while Achillini and Preti limp somewhat feebly after Marino’s Alcibidean swagger, and endless pastorals pullulate from Guarini’s tragi-comedy.  We need not occupy our minds with these secondary writers, nor do more than indicate the scholarly niceness with which Filicaja in the second half of the seventeenth century continued Chiabrera’s tradition.  But one word must be said in honor of Fulvio Testi, the Modenese poet and statesman, who paid for the fame of a Canzone with his head.  He has a double interest for us:  first, because Leopardi esteemed him the noblest of Italian lyrists after Petrarch; secondly, because his fate proved that Tasso’s dread of assassination was not wholly an illusion.  Reading the ode addressed to Count Raimondo Montecuccoli, Ruscelletto orgoglioso, the ode which brought Testi to the block in a dungeon of the Estensi, we comprehend what Leopardi meant by his high panegyric.  It is a piece of poetry, lofty in style, grave in movement, pregnant with weighty thought, stern and rugged, steeped in a sublimity of gloom and Stoicism which remind us of the author of La Ginestra.  The century produced little that bore a stamp so evident of dignity and greatness.

CHAPTER XII.

PALESTRINA AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERN MUSIC.

Italy in Renaissance produces no National School of Music—­Flemish Composers in Rome—­Singers and Orchestra—­The Chaotic Indecency of this Contrapuntal Style—­Palestrina’s Birth and Early History—­Decrees of the Tridentine Council upon Church Music—­The Mass of Pope Marcello—­Palestrina Satisfies the Cardinals with his New Style of Sacred Music—­Pius IV. and his Partiality for Music—­Palestrina and Filippo Neri—­His Motetts—­The Song of Solomon set to Melody—­Palestrina, the Saviour of Music—­The Founder of the Modern Style—­Florentine Essays in the Oratorio.

It is a singular fact that while Italy led all the European races in scholarship and literature, in the arts of sculpture and painting, in commerce and the sciences of life, she had developed no national school of music in the middle of the sixteenth century.  Native melody might indeed be heard in abundance along her shores and hillsides, in city streets and on the squares where men and girls danced together at evening.  But such melody was popular; it could not be called artistic or scientific.  The music which resounded through the Sistine Chapel, beneath the Prophets of Michel Angelo, on high days and festivals, was not Italian.  The composers of it came for the most part from Flemish or French provinces, bearing the names of Josquin Depres, of Andrew Willaert, of Eleazar Genet, of James Arkadelt, of Claude Gondimel; and the performers were in like manner chiefly ultramontanes.